Strategic Customer Success Manager (San Francisco)

Location: SF Bay Area

Type: Full-Time

About the Role:

LMArena invites applications for the role of Strategic Customer Success Manager , a strategically critical position dedicated to advancing partner and customer success across the AI research and development ecosystem. This role centers on fostering sustained, high-impact collaborations with AI research institutions, model developers, and forward-looking organizations leveraging LMArena’s evaluation infrastructure. The core objective is to ensure that each partner—whether a pioneering startup or an established AI lab—derives enduring value, actionable insights, and measurable outcomes through engagement with our platform.

We seek candidates who excel at navigating technical relationships through all phases of engagement: from initial onboarding and model evaluation to iterative feedback and long-term integration. The successful candidate will serve as both a strategic relationship builder and success advocate , working cross-functionally to ensure that partner needs inform the evolution of our platform, tooling, and community-facing programs.

This position offers a unique opportunity for individuals motivated by the chance to support leading-edge AI development while contributing to a broader vision of open, scientific, and community-driven evaluation practices.

Responsibilities:

• Identify and develop strategic relationships with AI labs, model developers, and research organizations to grow evaluation participation on the Arena platform

• Build and manage a pipeline of potential partners, including open-source contributors, startups, and enterprise AI teams

• Own outreach and onboarding workflows for new model evaluations, ensuring partners understand Arena’s evaluation process, policies, and technical requirements

• Collaborate with product and research teams to translate partner needs into roadmap inputs, pilot programs, or new tooling

• Support model testing efforts, helping providers get real-time feedback on variants in alignment with Arena’s leaderboard and community norms

• Coordinate co-marketing opportunities with the marketing team for case studies, and announcements with partner orgs to showcase impact and build credibility

• Track key partnership metrics and report on performance, growth, and engagement across model testing segments

Who is LMArena?

Created by researchers from UC Berkeley’s SkyLab , LMArena is an open platform where everyone can easily access, explore and interact with the world’s leading AI models. By comparing them side by side and casting votes for the better response, the community helps shape a public leaderboard, making AI progress more transparent, and grounded in real-world usage.

Why Join Us?

Trusted by organizations like Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and more, LMArena is rapidly becoming essential infrastructure for transparent, human-centered AI evaluation at scale. With over one million monthly users and growing developer adoption, our impact is helping guide the next generation of safe, aligned AI systems—grounded in open access and collective feedback.

Our work is regularly referenced by industry leaders pushing the frontier of safe and reliable AI. Sundar Pichai , Jeff Dean , Elon Musk , and Sam Altman .

• High Impact : Your work will be used daily by the world’s most advanced AI labs.

• Global Reach : Develop data infrastructure powering millions of real-world evaluations, influencing AI reliability across industries at the top-tier

• Exceptional Team : We are a small team of top talent from Google, DeepMind, Discord, Vercel, UC Berkeley, and Stanford.

Requirements:

• 5-7 years of experience in business development, strategic partnerships, or a similar role in a high-growth tech or AI-focused environment

• Proven ability to identify, develop, and grow partnerships with technical audiences, including AI labs, developer teams, or research organizations

• Strong communication skills with the ability to tailor messaging for both technical stakeholders and executive-level decision makers

• Familiarity with the AI landscape: language models, evaluation frameworks, open source ecosystems, and the competitive landscape

• Experience managing end-to-end partnership workflows, including outreach, onboarding, relationship management, and long-term engagement

• Ability to work cross-functionally with product, engineering, and marketing teams to align external partner needs with internal roadmap priorities and GTMs

• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with evolving priorities and high strategic upside

• Thoughtful, trustworthy, and proactive. Someone who can represent LMArena with credibility and clarity across the ecosystem

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working with AI/ML platforms or developer ecosystems, including familiarity with LLM evaluation and benchmarking workflows

• Background in developer relations, community-led growth, or evangelism for open-source projects

• Proven track record running joint go-to-market initiatives or co-marketing campaigns with technical partners

• Technical fluency with APIs and data-driven products, so that you can translate partner needs into actionable product feedback

What we offer:

• The cash compensation for this position in the market is 150k-200k. Actual compensation will depend on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and candidate location.

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, vision)

• The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team

• A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact

Come help build the space where anyone can explore and help shape the future of AI.